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Metaphor
Explanation and Analysis—The Cage of Poverty:
When reflecting on the Black working-class community in which she grew up, Lizabeth (who is narrating the story from decades in the future) uses a metaphor, as seen in the following passage:
In those days everybody we knew was just as hungry and ill-clad as we were. Poverty was the cage in which we all were trapped, and our hatred of it was still the vague, undirected restlessness of the zoo-bred flamingo who knows instinctively that nature created it to be free.
The metaphor here—in which Lizabeth describes poverty as being like “a cage in which [they] were all trapped”—communicates the way in which working-class Black people in the 1930s were, due to a combination of racism and the Great Depression, unable to change their class position. Just like animals unable to free themselves from their cage, Lizabeth implies, poor Black Americans had no hope of getting out of poverty.
Lizabeth builds on the initial metaphor by comparing the children in the community to “zoo-bred flamingo[es]” who know “that nature wanted [them] to be free” but who, because of their age, do not have the language to understand exactly what it is they are trapped in. As the story goes on, Lizabeth—who is 14 years old—has a coming-of-age experience by waking up to the reality of her family's class position after hearing her parents argue about finances.
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